One can look at each of the paths followed by the royals, the Catholics, and the Social Democrats as narratives about both group and urban identity. The
Catholics fashioned a new ritual that allowed them to proclaim publicly their identity rooted in the medieval city, while careful to do so within prescribed limits so as to avoid provoking conflict. The Social Democrats made the May Day parade a reflection of their growing political power and linked the new neighbourhoods of industrial workers to the central location of economic and political power, the Dam. The royal family, working to fulfil the desire of the Liberals for a unifying national symbol, sought public approval and adulation by traversing all neighbourhoods. The group identities involved in each case took very different forms. The devotion of the Catholic community drew on different sensibilities than the heightening of class consciousness by the Socialists, although both were creating means to achieve public recognition of an ideological position. The royal processions, by contrast, aimed to foster a national community above sectarian or political persuasion. In each case, a heightened experience of the city was used to promote these political aims and paths through the city were shaped as means of empowerment.
In topological terms paths consist of nodes of departure and arrival and the trajectories between them. Comparison of these is revealing of the fluidity with which meaning is assigned to each. While precedent plays a role in determining a path, it is the current, active process of making meaning that is most important in transfiguring space. The same buildings and places can take on significantly different meanings depending upon the social processes they are being asked to serve.
For the royal family the routes of the annual carriage rides started and ended at the Palace on the Dam. Such a use reinforced the association of the building as a royal symbol. But the building harboured an ambiguity of meaning stemming from the fact that it had been constructed in 1648 as the Amsterdam city hall, its iconography rife with reference to the city’s independent glory, later hailed by Voltaire as the very symbol of bourgeois democracy.40 Only from 1808, during the French occupation when Louis Napoleon was imposed as monarch, was the city forced to lend the building for royal use. In 1813, with the advent of the Dutch monarchy, the city chose to put the building at the disposal of the House of Orange. It was then repeatedly used as the symbolic reminder of Dutch nationalism, as much then a token of the nation as the city, as at celebrations of national independence in 1863 and 1872 when it was illuminated with lights forming ‘Oranje boven (Up with Orange). The city hall/palace remained both a symbol of the city and its illustrious history, especially its acme in the seventeenth century, but also and increasingly of the monarchy and the nation. Just before the First World War, the controversy over its designation broke out once more into public debate as many argued that it should be returned to the city. The annual visits by the monarch reinforced the definition of the building on the Dam as palace and national symbol.
Ambiguity also characterized the main marker for the Catholic Silent Procession. The Catholics no longer possessed the chapel commemorating the site of the miracle; they were literally excluded from the space that generated their ritual. And with the success of their procession, Protestant resentment and fear grew sufficiently that in 1898 the Dutch Reformed Church resolved to demolish the building. A long battle ensued, with voices protesting the demolition as much from the perspective of architectural preservation as from its tie to Catholic Amsterdam’s history. But all attempts to save the building were in vain, and from 1908 the Silent Procession began at a ruin.41 This had little effect on the procession, however, which adjusted to the loss of the marker as it had originally contended with exclusion from the marker’s space. Indeed, the path of the procession consisted almost entirely of spaces that had lost or changed the uses that gave the original procession its meaning: the civic significance of the Dam had altered, the productive use of the harbour had been displaced, the chapel was gone, and the main streets of the medieval city traced by the trajectory were no longer the primary commercial spaces of Amsterdam, some indeed having become the symbol of its decadence and debauchery. So not only was the procession the product of a contemporary strategy of discretion, the result of the Catholics’ minority status, but the meaning of the path itself required a contemporary sensibility which could give historical significance to spaces that could no longer sustain those meanings physically.
Both the Royal and the Catholic processions had a fixed starting and end point, marked by a significant building, the palace for the former, the site of the chapel where the miracle took place for the latter, each investing in one of several competing meanings. This was not the case for the Social Democrats whose paths changed from year to year. Here the ritual use of space was capable of anointing a steadily changing set of buildings as start and terminus. A series of meeting halls were used as gathering and end points: the Palace of Industry, Bellevue, the Parkschouwburg, or the Constantia Building. At times open air venues in the new districts of the city were used, such as the Oosterpark or Sarphatipark and for many years the ice skating rink behind the Rijksmuseum. Finally, the Stadium became the locale of May Day celebrations. Because of their function as the locations for gathering at the start or end of a march, these places resonated with meaning, becoming markers of time as much as space, as they stood for the collective experience of each subsequent generation that used them, engraved on the mental map of Red Amsterdam. But the ideal goal remained the Dam, located in the heart of the city, the site of commercial, municipal, royal, national, and economic power. This nexus of associations is best embodied by the Amsterdam Exchange, endpoint of the 1915 May Day march, satirized at the time by a cartoon of Mercury, god of traders and thieves, deploring the occupation of his capitalist temple by the workers. But while the contrast between the intended use of the building as entrepreneurial centre and its reconstitution as a place of protest and resistance is palpable, here too there is some ambiguity given the iconographic programme of the 1903 building which foretells of a Socialist utopia beyond capitalism. In this sense, the Labour Party’s use of the building for a May Day meeting might ironically be construed as the fulfilment of the building’s intention.
The Dam itself, the heart of the city, is the prime example of space that was repeatedly reinscribed with meaning through the spatial practices of these annual rituals. Its long use as the location of conflict between the forces of resistance and those of order and authority marked it as the ultimate public forum of the city. The site that in 1895 was the location of a demonstration of striking diamond workers suppressed by the police was the same site where in 1901 Wilhelmina appeared with her new husband to be serenaded, and the same location the Catholics participating in the miracle procession were directed to pray silently for fatherland and sovereign. Each of these performances used the same stage set as place of prayer, protest, and power, in each case contributing to the formation of group identity while associating the space with different experiences and, thus, with different meanings.
The trajectories, too, reveal fluctuating and simultaneous patterns of meaning dependent on their social construction through use. The traditional moving day in Amsterdam was 1 May and for bourgeois families this continued to hold meaning when the Left appropriated the day for their celebration. When an insurance company decided to build over one of the alleys used by the miracle procession, the organizers of the procession walked one last time over the path which would be closed, juxtaposing the entrepreneurial value given the space by its owners with the commemorative meaning ascribed by the Catholic faithful. Yet from the next procession, the detour of the path along a route never previously used, that is the transformation of space that had previously had no significance to the ritual, occurred without any acknowledgement by the participants. A space had thus been appropriated as part of the sacral route.
Equally significant is the contrast in meaning ascribed to centre and periphery of the city by the trajectories. The royal paths were centrifugal, moving outward from the central position of the Palace on the Dam to include the periphery of the city, while the paths of the Social Democrats, first restricted to the periphery, then moved centripetally to the centre, conquering the alien space of power, surging into the heart of the city from its outer rim.
The directionality of these movements was a spatial reenactment of their political aims, of conciliation on the one hand, of invasion on the other, in both cases in service to the construction of community bonds. However, we have also noted that the centripetal motion of the university students’ carriage ride denoted a home-coming, in contrast to the Socialists.
Despite the Socialists’ injunctions against working-class participation in royal events, including vituperous commentary in the Left-wing press, some workers participated in both rituals and thus had occasion to experience the Dam both as loyal subjects and as oppositional protesters. The majority of Socialists refused to participate, however, and socialist refusal to sing patriotic songs that lauded the House of Orange formed a voluntary silence that contrasted with the enforced silence of their early marches. Thus spaces could also be distinguished between those where voices could be raised and those where silence reigned, either imposed or voluntary. The Catholic Silent Procession occupies a special place here because the silence was both enforced and voluntary. No singing was allowed because that would then have constituted a collective religious procession, expressly outlawed. But the silence also created an atmosphere of piety and collectivity that forged bonds as strong as those forged by voices raised in song.
The Catholic procession was not only silent, it was held in the darkness of night. It was, in a sense, both inaudible and invisible. The experience of those who participated was heightened by the timing of the walk, a factor that certainly contributed to its effectiveness as a bonding event while also allowing the Catholics to avoid provoking the taunts that might have accompanied a procession in broad daylight. The Socialists, by contrast, often arranged May Day walks both in the afternoon and in the evening. While the liberal press placed the emphasis in its reporting on the degree to which traffic and tram transportation had been disrupted by these marches, it was exactly the level of massive occupation of the street that was celebrated in the Left – wing press. Daytime use of the city was thus a tool in making apparent the strength of the movement. While the Catholics wished for no audience, the Socialists and the royal family both created audiences. In the case of the royal processions and carriage drives through the city, the act only made sense to the extent that an audience was created, an audience whose allegiance to the royal family and thus to nation was being shaped by their presence along the paths the royals took through the city. This was often reflected in the decoration of the street which accompanied major events and which was divided between the elaborate professionally designed decorations that garnished the official path of a procession and the contrasting local neighbourhood decorations on side streets and neighbourhoods never penetrated by the royal family.42 In this sense, the theatricality of the royal processions is more apparent than that of the Catholics and Socialists, although the performative nature of each is equally operative. The royal family was on display, the Catholics were invisible, and the Socialists were insisting on being seen. Each of these activated space in contrasting ways to serve their ends.
Public knowledge of the paths also reveals differences in the approach to space. The royal paths were announced ahead of time in the newspapers in order to encourage the populace to line the streets. In contrast, the police gave orders that the routes of the May Day parades not be publicized in advance, ostensibly to avoid possible conflicts with opposing anarchist or Orangist groups. The path of the Silent Procession did not vary from year to year and thus was known to all. The royal paths turned the city into a theatre with an invited audience to view the colourful show; the socialists in their own terminology conquered the public street; the Catholics transformed the nighttime city into their own private historicist dream.
The various trajectories crossed over the plan of Amsterdam, meeting at the Dam, each describing a passage through the city that served its own political agenda. In so doing, these paths also implied a historiography of the city. The Catholic’s route described the medieval city associated with their own historic hegemony, an enactment of the Catholic historiography that associated the rise of Amsterdam with the pilgrimages to the miracle site. The royal emphasis on the seventeenth-century district during the annual visits and its repeated marking by official parades and by those associated with the Liberal establishment supporting the monarchy, reflected the association with this traditional site of power that the royals needed to legitimate their own. The Socialist connection with the periphery, both during the period of exclusion from the centre when they walked paths in the outer districts and later when they entered from the new city to the old from the periphery to the centre, reflected the expansion of the current city, its new working-class neighbourhoods, and an identification with its future growth.43 At the same time that they engaged with historical associations, the paths were involved with the creation of a new spatial character of the city. The very coexistence of these paths, followed without conflict, contributed to a modern definition of the public realm that permitted rich and simultaneous readings of the city’s spaces as the counterpart to the simultaneous occupation of the public sphere by competing ideologies.
When Wilhelmina gave birth to the heir apparent, Princess Juliana, on 30 April 1909, the near coincidence with May Day set in motion a demonstration of the nature of Amsterdam’s public rituals. In 1910 a week-long celebration of the princess’ first visit to the capital city was vociferously ridiculed by the Socialists and led to fears that the May Day parade would be disrupted by angry Orangists. When this did not transpire, the Algemeen
Handelsblad commented: ‘Isn’t the Netherlands the classic land of freedom: freedom of speech and of expression? In our country, doesn’t even a minority of the population have the indisputable and unquestioned right to proclaim its opinions publicly?’44 In the Liberal perspective the Socialists had been given the freedom to demonstrate. However, the path of the 1910 May Day parade circled only through the Pijp neighbourhood, completely exiled outside the seventeenth-century boundary of the city. Freedom here was under strict control. Both Catholics and Socialists around 1900 traced new paths through the city, but always within the constraints imposed by the dominant Liberal view of the public sphere. The spatial patterns of ritual paths in Amsterdam around 1900 reveal a complex and nuanced response to the emergence of a segmented society. They demonstrate that space is under constant construction, the same spaces inscribed and reinscribed with meaning as the same sites are activated in a dialectical relationship between the creation of urban and social identity. The Catholic emancipation process, the royal legitimization process, the Socialist process of resistance, each exploited the city’s spaces in ways that manifest the interaction of spatial practice and social process.